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WASHINGTON—They’re young. They’re liberal. They think Donald Trump is a racist, a danger, a fool.

They’re not planning to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s biggest electoral problem is the white men who have come to be the angry face of the Trump movement. But if the Republican demagogue gets elected president, her supporters might have reason to blame the most diverse, progressive demographic in American history: the millennials.

Or, perhaps more fairly, Clinton’s inability to connect with them.

“They clearly have not figured out this generation,” said Ben Tulchin, who was pollster for the Bernie Sanders primary campaign that crushed Clinton among millennials. “Trump is so anathema to everything they represent. With that said, in my view, she still has a lot of work to do to fully convince this generation she’s a true progressive. That she means it.”

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A spate of new polls this week suggests Clinton is lagging badly with voters aged 18 to 34 — underperforming not only the 2008 numbers of young-and-hip Barack Obama but the 2004 showing of patrician John Kerry. She is still the preferred choice of this group, but just barely.

It’s not that they have any fondness for her opponent. If this were a head-to-head matchup with Trump, as many Americans mistakenly believe it is, the battle for millennials would be no contest. In a Quinnipiac University poll this week, for example, Clinton leads 55 per cent to Trump’s 34 per cent with 18-to-34-year-olds.

But there are two other significant candidates in the race: Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein. With them in the mix, Clinton plummets to 31 per cent; Johnson gets 29 per cent, Trump 26 per cent and Stein 15 per cent.

In Thursday interviews, Democratic-leaning millennials backing Stein or Johnson said they were unsettled by Clinton’s ties to the political and economic establishment, unmoved by her efforts to raise fears about a Trump presidency, and unattracted to her personality.

“I am very unhappy with the obvious corruption in our current political system, which I feel is heavily influenced and controlled by the rich. It feels like my only option to stand against it,” said Sarah Grace Murphy, an unemployed North Carolina 22-year-old deciding between Johnson and Stein. “Even if it does result in Trump winning, it’s a risk I’m willing to take if it’s our only chance at preventing the cycle from continuing.”

“I’m tired of these 1 per cent families making their career off of the American people, whether it’s Bush or Clinton. Not to mention, nothing about her manner comes off as trustworthy,” said Aaron Tijerina, 29, an Arizona nurse and paramedic who supported Sanders and now backs Stein.

Tijerina, a Democrat of Mexican descent, said Trump’s treatment of minorities is “disgusting.” But that isn’t enough for him to consider Clinton, whom he thinks has “too much association with corruption.”

“I feel like if I vote for who I actually think should be president,” he said, “I’m not wasting my vote, whether they win or not.”

Millennials are idealistic, Tulchin said, and after falling in love with Sanders, some are having trouble coming to terms with someone for whom they aren’t head-over-heels. Having experienced political gridlock and economic upheaval, he said they are skeptical of a candidate who “represents the system.”

And he said Clinton has not yet done enough to prove that she is committed to her liberal platform. Though she adopted most of Sanders’s free-college plan in July, he said, “we haven’t heard much from the campaign about that since.”

“These voters really need her to talk about that plan and be committed to it,” Tulchin said. “It’s not really her forte to be unguarded and kind of deeply authentic about things, but she’s got to find her inner progressive voice to be able to speak to this generation effectively.”

California life coach Michael Hsu, a senior millennial at age 36, was a Sanders delegate to the Democratic convention. Now supporting Stein, he is dismayed Clinton has run what he called an “us versus them” campaign emphasizing the danger of Trump rather than progressive positions.

“You can’t campaign on fear,” he said. “You don’t just say ‘vote for me to stop him.’ Say ‘vote for me because we want a better world. We want better health care, better education and a better environment, and this is how we do it.’”

Clinton has time.

She has yet to fully unleash two formidable weapons: Obama and Sanders, both of whom remain popular with young people. Stein and Johnson, both of whom hold unorthodox views, have so far received little scrutiny. And the poll numbers of third-party candidates often fall as Election Day gets closer.

“I expect them to,” said Tulchin, who now runs Tulchin Research, “but they’re not going to fall because of gravity … Hillary’s got to go out and do this.”

If she does make a real effort, he said, she could gain a “huge” two points in national polls.

If she does not, there is a growing possibility that she will get Ralph Nader-ed.

As the race tightens to a near-tie in the wake of Clinton’s health scare and “deplorables” gaffe, her favourability rating with the 18-to-34 group remains poor: 36 per cent, according to Quinnipiac. Many of these people have no personal memory of the 2000 election that appeared to flip from Al Gore to George Bush because of the presence of the Greens’ Nader in Florida and New Hampshire.

And Clinton, 68, lacks Obama’s cultural connection to them.

“Both (Clinton and Trump), in the minds of young Americans, are from another era,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll. “To young people, these are pretty darn old people.”

Clinton’s campaign appears aware of her issues. It is deploying both Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Ohio this weekend to “lay out the stakes of November’s election for millennial voters.”

But it is not clear how open Clinton-skeptical millennials are to talk of “the stakes.”

“I wouldn’t feel like it would be my fault if these horrible things were to end up happening,” said Murphy. “Because I will know that I tried, and that my morals are in the right place.”

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